While Jeff Idelson Can Now Relax, Steve Baumann Gears Up

By JIM KEVLIN

---

COOPERSTOWN

Playing against Babe Ruth, or Magic Johnson, or Donovan McNabb, or Pele – that can get a sport under your skin.
As a Miami Toro, Steve Baumann did get to play Pele, a Cosmo, in 1976.
But equally captivating was that famous college game in 1971. Steve was in the Penn squad, ranked third, on the field against Harvard, ranked second. There were 17,000 fans at Franklin Field, Philadelphia, a crowd that wouldn’t be surpassed for decades.
And Penn beat Harvard, 5-2.
“It was one of those moments where you get to feel what it’s like,” said Baumann, who is completing his first year as president of the Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta.
When he and wife Karen moved to Otsego County – son Keith, 29, is a lawyer in New York City, and daughter Amy, 26, is a fair-housing advocate in Philadelphia – they bought a house on Nelson Avenue. Jeff Idelson, president of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, lives on Pioneer Street.
So Baumann’s arrival made Cooperstown unique in yet another way: As the only community in the nation – prove otherwise! – that is home to the top executives of two major sports halls of fame.
Idelson can relax just a bit right now. His 2008 Induction Weekend ended Sunday, July 27, when Rich “Goose” Gossage entered the baseball hall. (The other night, when he stopped by to pose for a photo with his soccer counterpart, he was on his way to an evening boat ride on Otsego Lake – and perhaps a sip of wine or two.)
Steve Baumann wasn’t quite there yet. His peak weekend of the year is Friday through Sunday, Aug. 1-3, when Anson Dorrance, pioneering head coach of the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer program, and Hugo Perez, the Salvador-born mid fielder who was 1991 U.S. Soccer Athlete of the Year, are entered into the Oneonta hall.
When you chat with Baumann and look at his vita, the top job at the Soccer Hall of Fame seems like a perfect fit.
He was raised in Westport, Conn., at a time when Staples High was one of the few schools in the country that took soccer seriously. He played basketball and baseball, but it was soccer that got him in the end.
“The game itself” is what did it. The “free floating” nature of it. “Players are in control of the game, not coaches,” he continued. The coaching happens in advance; once the whistle blows, it’s teamwork and individual determination that make the difference.
Baumann’s stats at Penn reflected both those qualities. He chalked up 30 career goals, but also 39 assists, records that still stand, and records that got him into professional soccer.
He had received a B.A. in elementary education at Penn, and during his half-dozen years in pro soccer obtained a M.S. in science education at the University of Virginia. He taught in Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia and also at the college level, at George Mason in Fairfax and Rosemont in Philadelphia.
He then shifted to museum work, with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, before joining the Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena, Calif., as executive director. It was from there that he came to Otsego County, the choice of a national search effort chaired by SUNY Oneonta’s then-president Alan Donovan.
The interview naturally came around to the similar and different challenges faced by the two Halls of Fame.
Baumann is adulatory about Cooperstown’s hall: “The finest sports and sports history museum on the planet,” he calls 25 Main.
But he’s also bullish about soccer – the only youth-participation sport that’s actually growing, “year after year, more than baseball, football and basketball.”
It’s further fueled by the nation’s demographic changes. Not just Hispanics, but eastern Europeans – virtually every immigrant, for that matter – come from countries where soccer rules. “Now, more than ever, there are soccer fans in this country,” he said.
Whereas the Baseball Hall of Fame seems to be looking ever more beyond Otsego County – the All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium was a Hall-of-Famer celebration; three vacancies on the HoF board were filled the other day by MLB President Bob Dupuy and two former players, no locals – Baumann is asking this question:
“What do we need to do to have a bigger impact in the local and regional community?” He adds, “How do we create value so people in the region” – from Albany, Binghamton, Utica, Syracuse – “come to visit us on a regular basis?”
Second, where the Cooperstown hall excells, the Oneonta hall has to as well: “How do we create larger image in the soccer world?”
If anything, Steve Baumann said, the proximity of the two halls can and should be a plus.
“What I hope we can do,” he said, “is aspire to an equal but different destination. I think that would make both of us stronger.”

Labels: Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, Front Page, Hall of Fame, Oneonta, Soccer Hall of Fame